In 1981 Richard Griffiths appeared in a BBC drama-documentary series called Prisoners of Conscience. He played William Beausire, an English businessman abducted, tortured and presumably killed by the Chilean secret police during the Pinochet era. Reviewing the program Nancy Banks-Smith, the astute TV critic of The Guardian, remarked that the story somehow seemed even more harrowing because the horrors were being visited on a fat man. It made him appear exceptionally vulnerable.

Girth and vulnerability were constants in the career of Griffiths who died last week in England, aged 65, personally mourned, it would seem, by everybody who either saw his work or was involved in it. The vulnerability he came by naturally and painfully; he had a brutal upbringing in the north of England at the hands of two deaf-mute parents who appear to have taken their frustrations out on him. The weight gain was artificial but irreversible, the result of radiation treatment he underwent at the age of eight to correct what was then his excessive thinness. He confessed in interviews that the transformation had its upside; he’d been bullied before, now he was able to do some bullying himself. He seemed properly shamefaced about this, but not excessively so. Still it seems to me that, if he’d discovered acting as a child (he didn’t), he would have been perfect casting for Piggy, the earnest scapegoat of Lord of the Flies.

Griffiths has attained the unofficial ranking of National Treasure, and is about to become an international one as well

All the obituaries have been pegged to his recurring movie appearances as Harry Potter’s beastly Uncle Vernon. The sheer visibility of that series may have made it his most famous role, and he may even have enjoyed playing it as a means of exorcising his own childhood traumas (call it Muggling Through), but it was far from typical. Most of his characters were very likeable; I almost said loveable, and that would probably have been true too, but his wasn’t the kind of acting that begs for an audience’s sympathy. There was a dignity about it that went with the physical bulk, and with a matching vocal weight; his words came out quiet but sculpted; conversationally understated, emotionally full. He always sounded thoughtful, and the thoughts could be complex; he left school at fifteen, but became a very convincing actor of intellectuals, especially bohemian ones. He was also able to vault, figuratively at least, from one side of the English class barrier to the other, and back again.

Way before Griffiths’ Uncle Vernon there was his Uncle Monty, the ambrosial sexual predator (more in thought than deed) of the cult movie Withnail and I, with his proudly sentimental streak (“as a youth, I used to weep in butcher’s shops”) and his memories of the devastating moment when, as an aspiring actor, he realized he would never play the Dane. Griffiths himself was never likely to be cast as Hamlet either, though he might have made quite an interesting one; the Shakespearean epithet most often applied to him was “Falstaffian”. He never, as far as I know, got to play the great Falstaff of the Henry IV plays, a huge missed opportunity on history’s part; he did, for the Royal Shakespeare Company, play the lesser Sir John of The Merry Wives of Windsor, but it wasn’t one of his most memorable turns.

It was at the RSC, though, that he first made his reputation, and most of his work there was glorious. He was lucky enough to join the company in 1976, at the start of one of its golden ages, and I was lucky enough, as critic of The Observe, to be around to chronicle it. I’m rather proud to have spotted him in his first, minor role: as the servant Peter in Romeo and Juliet, to which he brought the self-serious deliberation that was to mark all his clown performances. In those days the RSC moved the bulk of their repertoire to London after the Stratford-on-Avon season (the company’s never been the same since they stopped doing this) so the following year I was able to note that Griffiths seemed more assured in the role “with his Bottom, so to speak, behind him.” This meant that in the interim he had played the transported weaver in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. There can never have been a Nick Bottom more serenely confident of his pre-eminence among his fellow mechanicals; it’s not that he was egocentric, just that he knew his worth, without having to trumpet it. Anyone who knows Griffiths and knows the play can, I think, put two and two together and imagine how enchanting he was in his first encounter, only slightly abashed, with the fairy queen. and how magical in his awakening from his “most rare vision.”

He also appeared in a musicalised version of The Comedy of Errors, that was one of the most hilarious shows I’ve ever seen, and in which he played an Officer, whose attempts to arrest people invariably resulted in his dropping his halberd, very painfully, on his own foot. Griffiths balancing on one leg while clutching the other in agony became the production’s funniest running, or hopping, gag. (Another actor got the biggest laugh from it by doing a split-second impression while summarizing the action so far. This is called teamwork.) Trevor Nunn, who directed the show, along with most of the other great ones of the period, said that on this evidence Griffiths would obviously soon have to choose between staying on the stage or moving lucratively into TV sitcom.

As his Officer showed, he excelled at being accident-prone. (Reviewing a Russian play in the same season, I called him “the company’s prime putter-in of feet”). His defining RSC performance, though, came as a character able to rise above any mishap, largely because he never realised they were happening. This was George, the innocent abroad, in Nunn’s production of Once in a Lifetime, the vintage Broadway comedy about the birth of the talkies. George is one of a trio of New York adventurers who go out west to cash in on Hollywood’s transformation. The other two are wisecrackers who talk in sardonic metaphors, every one of which George takes literally. His sober responses are the play’s main repeated joke, but it would never have worked as well without Griffiths’ unreasonable reasonableness, his quite unsanctimonious holy foolishness. The play’s authors, Kaufman and Hart Inc., probably envisioned George as a stock buffoon; Griffiths made something wholly individual of him, so much so that I can hardly bear to imagine anyone else in the role. George, the complete chump, ends up running Hollywood. The play implies that he still does and always will. It’s possible.

Griffiths himself was never likely to be cast as Hamlet either, though he might have made quite an interesting one; the Shakespearean epithet most often applied to him was ‘Falstaffian’

Flash forward thirty years, to 2006. Griffiths has attained the unofficial ranking of National Treasure, and is about to become an international one as well. He’s created the central role in The History Boys, by Alan Bennett (another treasure), at the National Theatre cast, has toured the world with it and is now, with the rest of the original cast, on Broadway, winning a Best Actor Tony and providing me with the best evening (actually, it was an afternoon) I’ve had in the theatre in years. Griffiths plays Hector, officially teaching history to a class of university applicants, unofficially teaching them Life, which means going off at non-approved tangents, coaching them in the performance of old pop songs, and – regrettably – groping them while giving them lifts on his motor-bike; though Griffiths himself has pointed out that how much Hector could actually feel through his gauntlets must be a very moot point. Hector is a sad man in many respects, a brave one in others, and Griffiths took full possession of him. I don’t know if the part was written for him, but it did seem as if he had been moulded for it. His wit and delicacy and absolute naturalness had never been more perfectly aligned. The film version diminishes the stage production, but is a mostly faithful record of it. We can still hear him musing on what tourists can make of the preserved Nazi death camps (do they buy souvenirs?) and enjoy one of the great multi-levelled scenes of modern drama in which Hector and the most awkward of the boys, lovesick for somebody else, pass each other by emotionally while discussing a classical text.

What with Hector and Uncle Monty, Griffiths must rank as one of the leading straight actors of gay men. He added a third to his list when he played W. H. Auden in another Bennett play, The Habit of Art. He was last-minute casting, but again he seemed the ideal Bennett actor; they shared a north-country background, an irresistible humour, and a quality of being prickly but endearing. The play shows an aged and disorderly Auden re-visiting England after long absence, mistaking an interviewer for a rent-boy, and trying to coax his old friend and collaborator Benjamin Britten out of an aesthetic closet. Griffiths played him with a despairing breeziness; he also, since the piece was a play within a play, got to step out of the frame as an actor highly sceptical of the writing and direction he was being given. Theatre has seldom seemed more verite.

The Griffiths’ delicacy: it was all-pervasive, physical as well as mental, despite the corpulence. Or maybe that contributed; there are plenty of graceful weighty men. “He could” said Nicholas Hytner, who directed him in the two Bennett plays, “be both very funny and very desolate.” Hytner also called him “one of the very greatest British actors.” That’s just.

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